Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Bob!

Thanks so much for joining the discussion. Are you saying you added keywords to the business titles of Google My Business listings and saw a rise in rank/visibility? Or are you saying you removed keywords? Just want to be sure I'm understanding.

Was the chat with Google support desk some months ago? Google has disconnected Plus from Local, so I'm concerned you may have received outdated advice from Google's support, if it's the case that they are still telling people to post on Plus.

I'd love to hear more, on both points.

Greetings Ian,

Thanks for coming to Q&A with your question. I want to be certain that I understand your client's situation. You mention the queries

First Aid Training in Cornwall
First Aid Courses in Cornwall
Health and Safety Training in Cornwall

These are not, per se, local queries. Google Places (and most of local search) is a city based application. If the client is in Victoria, Cornwall, then 'Victoria' is actually his true local term. I am in the U.S., so things may be slightly different here, but at any rate, I would expect the client to rank well in Places for Victoria-related queries and that efforts to go after the county of Cornwall would need to be chiefly organic in nature.

Is this correct or am I misunderstanding what you are describing?

In general, in North America, the website is an extremely important part of any local campaign. One applies all traditional SEO techniques + the strong usage of geographic data. So, good onpage SEO, lots of local-focused content and linkbuilding are all going to be party of your work with local-focused clients to achieve high Places rankings for their city of location.

At the same time, they need to have a clean, complete Places record (no violations!) and work to accrue citations and reviews within Google. Simultaneously, they need good records in the major 3rd party local business indexes in your country. All of this comes together to create a winning Internet presence.

In closing, there was a shakeup here in N. America some weeks ago. My friend and colleague, Linda Buquet, has dubbed this change the 'proximity algo lockout'. I don't know if this happened overseas as well, but I recommend you read about Google's apparent new narrower circle from city center in their results:

http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/google-places-algorithm-ranking-drop.html

Did this happen in the U.K. as well, and could it have affected your client's rankings? Just a thought.

Hi There!

I just responded over on your other thread, but wanted to include think link for you to a thread I started when Google announced their doorway pages update:

http://moz.com/community/q/how-google-s-doorway-pages-update-affects-local-seo

I hope you'll find that helpful!

Hi Jim,

While it won't hurt you, are you sure it would be useful for your clients in City A  to click over to your City B page, or might that just add unnecessary clutter and confusion to the page?

Hi Ron,

I'm the Local SEO Associate here in Q&A. The response Robert has given you is correct. Google's guidelines would not allow the procedure you are describing. The requirements in order to qualify for a Google Place Page are that you have:

1. A legal business name

2. A local area code phone number

3. A physical street address (not a P.O. box or virtual office) to which customers either come to do business with you or from which your employees depart in order to serve customers at their locations (think chimney sweep, landscaper, etc.)

I think your situation is rather interesting, in that I do detect some grey area. What follows is not my suggested advice, but it does point out some of the lack of clarity and potential loopholes in the guidelines. I present this only for educational and hypothetical purposes.

Let's say your band is actually a company with a registered, legal business name. Let's say your main headquarters are your home in San Francisco. Let us further say that you appoint 3 band members as franchise owners. These franchise owners have their headquarters in Berkeley, Oakland and San Jose. Let's say that each franchise owner has a distinct local area code phone number and street address (all under the company's legal business name) and each franchise owner is empowered to take bookings over the phone, hold practices at their facility and that the band heads out from these franchise headquarters to do a gig in each of the respective 3 cities, as well as from your main office in San Francisco.

In a situation like this, one could almost reason that it would be logical for each of the franchises to have their own Place Page.

But in reality, I would call this an extreme long shot, and I believe Google could well consider an abuse of their intended use of the system, hence my warning that this is not my advice. It's interesting to consider, though. Situations like yours are why I would like to see more minutely detailed guidelines published by Google.

In all honesty, I believe your most above board move is to get a very clean, violation-free Place Page in place for your business in the city in which it is located, and then do what other go-to-client business models do: depend on your organic efforts for additional visibility in the cities in which you serve.

When I work with a client like, for instance, a mobile notary public, my process is to get her site well-optimized for her city of location, get her local business profiles created and claimed and then put a plan in place for creating very strong content on her website for the additional cities in which she serves. Of course, both she and I would love for her to be able to have a Place Page for all of the cities in her service area, but this simply isn't how Places works.

I would recommend that you read the Google Places Quality Guidelines yourself in case anything I've written isn't clear: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528

Good luck with the band! Sounds fun!

Hi There!

Thanks so much for clarifying this. So, if the business does not make in-person contact with its customers, it's a virtual business rather than a local one, meaning that there are 2 options here:

1. Attempting to earn ORGANIC (not local) rankings for service/city terms via the content you have created on the website. How reasonable it is to create a landing page on the website for every city you serve is going to depend on:

a) whether the services are different in each city, making it easy to create unique content

b) if the services are the same in all cities, finding something unique to write about for each city.

The major pitfall here to beware of is creating a ton of thin/duplicate pages for every possible city, thereby watering your website down with a lot of poor quality content. This can harm you rather than help you. If you're a virtual business and want to compete for city-type organic rankings, you must create super, unique content, or don't be tempted to create it at all. It can end up exposing the website to Google filters or, worse, penalties.

2. Alternatively, if you decide you don't have the resources or reason to create a unique page for every city in which the service is available, use PPC instead. Pay to appear in important cities.

What you can't do here is create Google+ Local pages because the business lacks in-person contact with customers, so you cannot rank in the local packs of results.

Further reading on this: https://moz.com/blog/local-landing-pages-guide

Hope this helps!

Hi Kristen,

Yeah, I just don't think Google+ really caught on the way Google might have hoped. But Posts could totally be interesting, if it becomes widely available.

Hello Parvesh,

I want to clarify whether your screenshots are intended to display your own business, or if you are merely illustrating the difference between the local results you would like to have vs. the organic results you currently have. Is your business the Sacramento legal firm being highlighted in the screenshots? Please, do clarify this for me.

In order to send the strongest possible local signals to Google, you will need a powerful combination of the following:

1. A physical address and local phone number within the city you'd like to rank for.

2. A terrific, locally optimized website

3. A Google+ Local page for the business and a clean record with Google

4. Google-based reviews

5. Reviews from other sources

6. Citations (as mentioned in Wissam's comment)

7. Possibly, linkbuilding

The competitiveness of your industry and location will dictate how hard you need to work at each of these things to gain local visibility. If you can see anything on that simple list that you know you haven't fully implemented or explored yet, then this may well be the key to your question.

I'm responding in very general terms here, not being sure of your actual business or the nature of the efforts you have made to date. I hope this helps you get started thinking about a plan of action!

Miriam

Hi There!

We'd likely need to see your exact example to make guesses on this one. Happy to take a look if you're able to share your brand name and location keyword.

Hi Stephen,

My apologies, but I am simply not very familiar with geographic designations in your country. In the US, Local SEO geared toward local pack rankings is totally hinged on cities, never counties. If counties are an important search term for your business, you can make an organic effort in that regard with content you build on your website to reflect these terms, but the core of your Local SEO will be city-based, not county-based, and will apply to the city/cities in which you are physically located.

I hope you'll receive further feedback from the community.

Hi Ruben,

I'm assigning your question to the help team in hopes that you'll get a helpful answer regarding the language you're seeing on the Moz Local reporting.

Hello Parvesh,

Thanks for the clarification about this being your business. Within the scope of Q&A, I cannot perform a full audit of the situation, which is likely what you are going to need to pinpoint the exact cause of what you are experiencing. I can, however, provide a few quick thoughts from my limited look at the situation:

1. Searching from my own location in N. California, the search term in your screen shot, 'sacramento personal injury law firm' is not bringing up any blended or pack local results, for any business. Setting my location to Sacramento, I see the same thing. So, in this case, it appears that you have not been singled out in a change of results, but that Google is not choosing to display true local results for this query. Unfortunately, this is not something you can control. It it completely up to Google to decide for which queries they will show local vs. organic results.

2. This aside, you mentioned that you've got all the points in my earlier list well covered, but I would take a second look at #2 on the list. As a Local SEO, the first place I always look to begin gauging whether a site is locally optimized is at the footer. On your site, I do not see a marked up full NAP (name, address, phone number) in the the footer, and, in fact, am seeing a toll free number there. While you may be doing other things right on your website, this fact alone would indicate to me that you don't have a skilled Local SEO on-board your team. Lack of proper attention to local optimization can definitely hold back your ability to rank locally for any term, though this is evidently not the cause of your present scenario in which no local firm is receiving local rankings.

3. When a site is failing to rank for any term, I always start looking for duplicates. It appears there is a closed business sharing your address: https://plus.google.com/110885790754843227431/about?gl=us&hl=en

Perhaps this is a partner who has left the business, or you are attempting to shut down individual attorney listings due to Google's recent changes with their handling of multi-partner firms, but at any rate, it's still indexed at this point, even though it has been closed. Without a thorough look at the scenario, I can't say if there are duplicates that could be issues for you, but if there are, they always have the potential to lessen your ability to rank locally for a desired term.

4. Doing a maps.google.com search for 'sacramento, ca' vs. a search for your firm's address, I see that your business is located quite a ways outside the cluster of legal firms near the city centroid. Again, this would be another thing to look into if you are failing to rank for other terms which are still receiving local results.

In sum, there are many, many factors to consider in ranking issues when it comes to local. Right now, for the query you have mentioned, you are gaining the best possible ranking because you are #1 organically for a term for which Google is displaying organic-only results. There is nothing you can do to control Google's decision to display results this way. They could change what they are doing with that specific query tomorrow, but right now, you are in the best position you can achieve in this set of results.

Hope this helps!

Miriam

Hi Mark,

I'm extremely sorry to hear you're feeling disappointed, and I do hope you will contact our Helpsters who can look at the specifics of your listing with you. We are there to help! You are even welcome to put my name in the title of your email to us and I will look at your account myself.

In the meantime, some general thoughts here:

1. Moz Local is, indeed, a popular tool, but many people are also fans of the manual service provided by Darren Shaw's company, Whitespark. BrightLocal is also well-spoken-of by many. Here is a comparison guide from Bright Local that you might find useful: https://www.brightlocal.com/2014/05/27/mozlocal-vs-yext-vs-ubl-vs-brightlocal-vs-whitspark/

2. Though Moz Local will report Google duplicates to you, we don't have the ability to close them, as Google is not one of our Direct Network partners. If you are seeing falling rankings on Google due to Google duplicates, and you feel like you don't have the time or know-how to deal with this correctly, you may want to consider hiring an expert Local SEO consultant who will either guide you in undertaking best practices yourself, or, implement the work for you. Every year here on Moz, we conduct our Local Search Ranking Factors survey, and on the right side of that survey, you will find a box titled 'Contributors'. Most of the participants in that survey are recognized experts in this field, and it's likely that any of them would help you audit your scenario, discover and rectify problems for you.

3. We also have a very good free tutorial here on the Moz blog that you might find useful in determining which factors are contributing to your falling rankings. Remember that citations are just one of many, many factors that contribute to Google rankings.

I do hope you'll write to our Helpsters, Mark, and we'll do our best to serve you.

You're welcome, Ruben. I hope the Help Team can help you get this sorted out.

Great discussion going on here! David, I will ask our help staff to look at your question #1.

Hey Jason!

So glad those tips helped you identify an industry centroid that may be a contributing factor. Way to go! Some thoughts on this:

1. Go into this knowing that it can be VERY difficult to overcome something like this and that your best bet here is likely to be a full, professional audit by a skilled Local SEO consultant. A good place to look for one is the Contributors box on the right side of last year's Moz Local Search Ranking Factors. Here are some questions for you to ask yourself, either for your own purposes, or to share with a consultant.

2. Are you 100% certain that you are located inside of the official city limits? As I mentioned on your other thread, do the Maps lookup of your city name and be sure you are inside of the pink city border instead of outside of it. If you're outside, then the goal of ranking in the Local pack for that city/keyword combo is likely out.

3. If you are inside the city borders, how far are you from the industry centroid? Are any other players as far away as you are and still ranking in the top 10 or so results?

4. If so, do an audit of any competitor that is as far away as you are, but is managing to rank in the top 10 on the Map. Identify every piece of information you can that might be contributing to their rank (age, domain authority, reviews, vibrant content, citations, etc.). Mine this data to see if there is a pattern or a weakness you can identify that you would be able to use to your advantage, with the goal of helping you get into the pack.

5. Do not make the mistake of thinking that the industry centroid is the sole cause of what you are experiencing. If you're outside the city borders, then, yes, that's probably the main cause, but if you're inside the borders, a business which is supremely strong enough should have hope of overcoming an industry centroid bias. But, remember, there may be multiple causes contributing to low rankings.

6. Finally, don't forget that user-as-centroid is likely to overcome industry-centroid bias, in that your customers who are physically closest to you on their phones may be seeing a different set of results, which do include you.

Just some quick thoughts. Hope they help!

Hi Dragonsearch,

Unfortunately, no. Moz Local has to be able to validate the business info you provide us with the business info we find either on the Google+ Local or Facebook local business page. If the pages can't be found or the name, address, phone and website on them don't identically match what you've entered in the Moz Local dashboard, we can't validate. You would need to access the Google+ Local or Facebook local business page, edit the data to match, see that your edits go live and then try to validate through our system.

Hope this clarifies how this works!

Hi Stacey,

If you the Google+ business page you created was not created in the local category, you cannot merge it with a Google+ Local page. See Google staffer Jade W explanation of this here:

productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/business/3R1-XOGvVzE

Also recommend you read:

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/business/2U2NmtIi0Xg

Hope this helps!

Hey There!

Thanks so much for taking the time to contribute to this discussion. The geographic variations you mention sound normal to me, but the issue of the companies consistently ranking highly for no apparent reason is interesting. Are you saying the search is yielding a onebox (just one result) or a normal pack? Is the name of the business an exact or close match of the keyword phrase you're searching for? Is the business right in the middle of a cluster or similar businesses? Sounds like a good puzzle!

Hi Ruben,

That's right. Just sit back. You should expect fully updated status in about 8 weeks from your purchase date. Thanks for asking!